Wandering in the Wilderness with Angela Roskop Erisman

Angela Roskop Erisman The reason that we look for an Exodus and a Moses in the late Bronze Age is because we understand this story as history writing. But once we understand that, oh, this started at least its life as fictional biography, that is political allegory, suddenly the whole world can look different.

Dan McClellan Hey, everybody, I'm Dan McClellan.

Dan Beecher And I'm Dan Beecher.

Dan McClellan And you're listening to the Data Over Dogma podcast, where we increase public access to the academic study of the Bible and religion, and we combat the spread of misinformation about the same. How go things, Dan?

Dan Beecher Man, spring is sprung here- ... in Salt Lake City.

Dan McClellan It's- We hit the 70s for the first time in a long- The high 70s, my friend. High 70s, yeah.

Dan Beecher The high 70s. Oof. I was out for a walk and was sweating a little bit. So, life is good. I'm happy. Some of the trees are getting leaves, and the world's just coming back to life, and I'm- Yeah ... I'm into that.

Dan McClellan But- The SAD is hitting the bricks for a lot of folks- That's right ... around my neck of the woods- That's right ... which is always nice. Yeah.

Dan Beecher Hey, let's stop jabbering and get on with our... Because we got a guest here- Excellent ... in the house. So, why don't you introduce our guest?

Dan McClellan Say hi, everybody, to Angela Roskop Erisman, who is joining us from Cincinnati, right? Yes. Awesome. Oh. Fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us this evening, Angela. And, we are here to talk about a few different things. But first off, we were talking a little bit about your background and, that you are an independent scholar who specializes in Torah, or Pentateuch, or whatever you want to call the first five books of Moses. And, you have a bit of a non-traditional background when it comes to your Bible scholarship. You want to talk about that a little bit? Sure.

Angela Roskop Erisman I have a pretty traditional path through graduate school. I went to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and Hebrew Union College here in Cincinnati.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Angela Roskop Erisman So that's a pretty standard path. But, I married a bourbon distiller and needed to stay near Kentucky. So. You know what?

Dan Beecher That is a good reason to stay near Kentucky.

Angela Roskop Erisman Isn't it, though?

Dan Beecher I will give you that.

Dan McClellan The heart wants what the heart wants. Right.

Angela Roskop Erisman I guess so.

Dan Beecher As does the liver, apparently. Yeah. Right.

Angela Roskop Erisman So, I've done a variety of different things. I'm one of the founding editors of The Marginalia Review of Books. And I do editorial work for various clients, and I've taught in various places. And of course, I am very busy also with my own scholarship. And I share your interest in making sure that everybody gets access to the Bible.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Angela Roskop Erisman And so I care very much about those issues, and so I'm just delighted to be here.

Dan McClellan Well, you mentioned The Marginalia Review of Books, which means you know Timothy Michael Law.

Angela Roskop Erisman I certainly do.

Dan McClellan He was my thesis supervisor at Oxford.

Angela Roskop Erisman Uh-huh. Yeah. Yeah.

Dan McClellan I think that was around the time he was writing "When God Spoke Greek." Yeah. So yeah, wonderful guy. Yeah. I have not talked to him for a while. He is gallivanting around the world doing all kinds of entrepreneurial stuff. He is. So, well, that's great to meet another person from The Marginalia Review of Books. I've really appreciated some of the stuff that they have put out.

Dan Beecher Just for those of us who aren't deep in the world of biblical academia, tell us what that group is. What is The Marginalia? I don't know what that word is, even, so help us out. Yeah.

Angela Roskop Erisman It started, oh gosh, 2012, 2013, as an online review of books in the field of religion and ancillary fields. And they brought me on initially as someone who would acquire reviews in Hebrew Bible. And then they realized that I have a background in editing and publishing and Which became a little bit useful in that context. So, that's, I believe, what The Marginalia Review of Books still does. I haven't been affiliated with it for several years now. But they're still putting out great stuff. High-level, long reads, but making it available, the same thing you guys are doing. Yeah.

Dan Beecher Love it. That's great. It's been...

Dan McClellan I've really enjoyed it as a resource. It has also been a while since I've been deeply involved in that reading. But when we talked about having you on the show, one of the things that I appreciated was that you told me you were going to go pick out a shirt. Aha. Because I have a reputation- You do. And the folks who are listening to this, we'll just have to imagine things. But I am wearing a shirt that I got for free at a Comic-Con. It's several of the Avengers, but 8-bit graphics. So, they're the 8-bit Avengers. And every time I wear this in a video, people ask me where I got the shirt. A lot of people like it. But you told us there was a story behind the shirt that you have chosen.

Angela Roskop Erisman There is a story behind my shirt, and it's not a gaming shirt, or, well, it is a kind of gaming shirt- All right ... because it's related to our Major League Soccer team, FC Cincinnati. Oh, okay. But it says, as you will see, "Hell is real." Okay. So, I have to tell you the story behind Hell is Real. Yeah, okay. So, being here from the Midwest, and I've lived my entire life in the Midwest. I went to college in Wisconsin. I grew up in Minnesota. We have a lot of kitschy things in the Midwest, including road signs. Okay. In fact, here in Cincinnati, we have a whole museum dedicated to American road signs. It's pretty cool. If you ever come through, you should check it out. But, on the interstate between Cincinnati and Columbus is a great big sign that some guy decided decades ago that he would put in his cornfield, or whatever he's growing there, that says, it's giant, and it says, "Hell is real," with a red H, and it's a black sign, and the other letters are outlined. If you Google "Hell is real sign," you can see it. Okay. Yeah. So, the- Doing it now. Doing it now. The soccer connection is because the rivalry now between the Cincinnati and Columbus MLS teams is called the Hell is Real Derby because of this sign.

Dan Beecher I love that.

Angela Roskop Erisman So, it's a piece of Cincinnati kitsch. Okay. Everyone here knows the Hell is real sign. Yeah. Right? Anyway.

Dan Beecher And the truth is that, coming from Salt Lake City as I do, I read that, when I think about Major League Soccer, when I read that, it says Hell is Real. Yes. Well- Because Real Salt Lake is our local team.

Angela Roskop Erisman Uh-huh. Yeah. And of course, you can buy a beer at the stadium, Hell is Real. That's a kind of beer also. Anyway. But this shirt has a significance to what we're doing today because, of course, that sign, setting aside the soccer, the purpose of that sign is to scare people into religious belief. Right.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. Right? Absolutely. Yeah.

Angela Roskop Erisman And so, as you probably know, I deal with the rhetoric of fear in my book. Yes. Indeed.

Dan McClellan That was something that kept popping up. I did notice that. It did. It did. So- Yeah. There were a couple other things that kept popping up, too, which I want to talk about. Yeah. Sure.

Angela Roskop Erisman So, I don't want to make you start in a particular place, but I thought that when I was looking for a kitschy shirt to wear, I was like- Mm-hmm ... that is the one.

Dan Beecher I love it. Yeah.

Dan McClellan It really ties the room together- Yeah ... to quote the great poet. Yeah. Which brings up one of the things we're here to talk about, your recent publication with Cambridge University Press, "The Wilderness Narratives in the Hebrew Bible: Religion, Politics, and Biblical Interpretation," which just came out the beginning of this year, correct?

Angela Roskop Erisman It did, yeah. Okay.

Dan McClellan Congratulations on that, by the way. I hope you've been getting- Thank you so much. Yeah. I hope you've been getting wonderful feedback.

Angela Roskop Erisman So far. Awesome. Good. It's early, as you know of- Yeah, it's early. There are going to be- As you know, books are new for, like, three years in our field.

Dan Beecher Ah, right.

Dan McClellan And that is true, which is so weird. My trade book is coming out shortly, and- Mine? ... there are already reviews out. Yeah. It won't get published for over a month, and there are already reviews out. And I particularly liked it because one of them was from, oh gosh, some very big literary outfit, and it was a very glowing review. And then the same day, I looked on Goodreads, and there was a review that had given my book one star. And so, I posted the two of them next to each other. I was like, "Two new reviews of my book." One was very glowing, and then the other one said, "One star. I didn't really read this."

Dan Beecher I said I was sorry about that one, Dan. I thought it was funny. Oh.

Dan McClellan Luckily, the channels through which biblical scholarship gets peer reviewed tend to weed those kinds of things out. But- Yeah ... in the world of trade publishing, we have no such luck. But your book, obviously dealing with the wilderness narratives, is going to be about Exodus numbers, some of the events, and the characters that are in that. But I noticed something that I really enjoyed reading through the introduction. You talk quite a bit about genre, which is something that's so hot right now- ... at least for biblical scholars. But I wonder if you wouldn't mind, because most of our listeners are not going to have the background that I think the reader you projected for this book- Right ... would have on these debates.

Dan Beecher Can you talk a little bit- Half of the podcast co-hosts of this don't have the background- ... for this. Almost 50% of them.

Dan McClellan Would you mind talking a little bit about this background that you're alluding to, this debate in the intellectual history regarding historicity and genre, so that we can get a foundation for where you're taking this discussion?

Angela Roskop Erisman Sure thing. I would, if I may, separate those two issues. Okay. Genre and historicity. They have a lot- Yeah ... to do with each other. But let's talk about genre first because that was really what made me want to undertake this study, because we have these episodes throughout the wilderness narrative, the complaint episodes.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Angela Roskop Erisman So, the Israelites complain, and Moses responds, and God comes in with a miracle, and either everything is okay or everybody gets punished. Right. Right? That's the gist.

Dan McClellan Quote, unquote, "punished," yeah. Yeah.

Angela Roskop Erisman So, there's this plot structure, repeats itself over and over again, but the stories are all so different. So, why is that? And so, what I wanted to look at is how that plot structure was combined with different genres that we know from the ancient Near Eastern world.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. Also, the Mediterranean. So, we have some biography, we have some political allegory, we have some stuff from the Greek world, we have some tragedy, we have some rhetoric.

Angela Roskop Erisman All of which is getting mixed in with this plot structure.

Dan McClellan So, that's- That's really what genre is about. And the reason why genre is so important is because we can't interpret a text without a sense of what kind of text we're reading. Right.

Angela Roskop Erisman And this matters immensely for the second thing, Dan, that you mentioned, the issue of historicity, or what we might just say, broadly speaking, if I may be super loose about this, the way that a literary text relates to history.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Angela Roskop Erisman Now, we usually think of that happening in only one way. Well, it somehow must match some set of historical events that we then try to go and find. But that is not the only way that literature can relate to history. When we write literature, and this is true of literature in really any period, it's situated.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. Right?

Angela Roskop Erisman The stuff that the author knows, not just historical dates and people and events, but also places, and even genres are historically situated. Right. Right? So genre then becomes a way that we can understand a different kind of relationship between literature and history, and I think it was one that, for me, was just mind-blowing in my study. And I came into this with a lot of experience studying this, and my mind was blown repeatedly by what I discovered. So Well, so- Is that fun?

Dan Beecher Yeah, it's very fun. Can you guide us through a little bit of what specifically was blowing your mind? Give us some of the broad strokes of the things that you discovered as you were exploring this. Sure.

Angela Roskop Erisman Well, the big one, and I waged you're going to ask me about this one anyway, so we may as well start- ... with the man himself, Moses. Right. Right? I'm a big fan girl, and- ... even more so now. So who's Moses, right? As probably you've dealt with on episodes of your podcast that I haven't listened to, or videos of the search to try to find a historical Moses, and where do we look for that? And as many of your listeners may be aware, whether from here or other poking around, that there's really not a lot to say. Right. And so we basically go around banging our heads on brick walls and becoming bloody over this, right? Yeah. Well, so in looking at the episode in which Moses gets water from a rock in Exodus, how does that make sense?

Dan McClellan And to make a long- And this is something that I get asked about all the time. People are like, "That doesn't make any sense, that he doesn't get to enter the promised land. He's kind of cursed as a result of this weird story where he's got to draw water from a rock." But- Yeah ... water keeps coming up multiple times, not only in the wilderness narratives, but in your book, it comes up- It does ... repeatedly as an important symbol. It does. So sorry to interrupt, but I- No, no, no. This is a chat.

Angela Roskop Erisman It's wonderful. I shouldn't be blabbing the whole time. So that's the other rock water story. We want to- Right ... maybe come back to that a little bit later. But the one I want to talk about first is the one in Exodus, where he succeeds in getting water from a rock, and it's a good thing. All right. So how do we make sense of this story? And to make a long story short, I realize that it's linked to the Exodus story, to a version of the Exodus story that involves Moses' birth story. Hmm. And as biblical scholars have long recognized, that story of the baby in the basket, we all know that story. Yeah. It's modeled on a text about the Assyrian King Sargon II, who has a similar story of being abandoned and adopted, and this is the story of how he becomes king.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Angela Roskop Erisman And the genre of this story is fictional biography, okay? These are royal texts, and Sargon's is not the only one, but it's the one that has the closest relationship with the Exodus story. These are royal propaganda, right? Yeah. They're designed to convey to others that the king is legitimate. Right? So I realized that these elements of the Moses story are not just in Exodus 2, but you can track the plot line all the way to Exodus 17. And so the question then becomes, and these fictional biographies in Mesopotamia are political allegory, right? The Sargon narrative is a narrative about the neo-Assyrian King Sargon, but it looks like, it reads like it's about Sargon the Great.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Angela Roskop Erisman The king from millennia earlier, the first-ever emperor. And so the biblical story is modeled on that. Why? Why would we tell the story of Moses as an Assyrian story? Well, that ends with drawing water from a rock. Well, we know a king who was entangled with Assyria His name is Hezekiah.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. Right?

Angela Roskop Erisman And he was faced with threat from Sargon's son, Sennacherib. And to survive that threat of siege, well, we have to take a step backwards and understand quickly why he was under threat. Because he had allied against Assyria with Egypt. Hezekiah's story starts in Egypt, just like Moses's story starts in Egypt.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. Right?

Angela Roskop Erisman But that rebellion failed, and Sennacherib is coming, and we are in a lot of trouble now.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. Right? Not gonna win this one. Right?

Angela Roskop Erisman Well, how do we survive it? If we can't win it, how do we survive it? And as we know from the Books of Kings and Isaiah, one of the things that Hezekiah did was build an aqueduct to bring water into the city to enable his people to sustain the siege. Well, what do we think the rock water story is about? It's about this, 701. Okay. Right? Yeah. This early version of the Exodus narrative is political allegory, right? That is probably designed, I suspect, to convince the Assyrians to leave him on the throne. Hmm. Right?

Dan Beecher So, sorry, I'm just trying to process this. So the idea is that Exodus, or at least that part of Exodus, was written in the time of Hezekiah as an allegory, that the people of that timeframe would've understood it allegorically?

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. It was written allegorically.

Angela Roskop Erisman This is an important difference because in the history of biblical interpretation, there are key interpreters like Philo, Philo of Alexandria- Mm ... and others who interpret the Bible allegorically, which means you can kind of take anything and make an allegory out of it. Right. Right? What I'm saying, Dan, is what you just said, which is it's written as allegory. It's meant to be allegory. And that's a very important difference. So Moses, right, the water drawer. Who's the water drawer who started in alliance with Egypt but- Hmm ... ended up independent? It's Hezekiah, right? Right. So we have a historical Moses.

Dan McClellan We do. Yeah. Right?

Angela Roskop Erisman We have a historical Moses. But what's important here is that, well, there's a lot of important things, but one of them is that we don't lose a connection to history. We just get a different one. Do you see what I- Yeah.

Dan McClellan And that's what allows the text to gain purchase- Yes ... on an audience. If it's not somehow informing their experiences or allowing them to view themselves and their background through the lens of the story, then it's not going to remain very salient for them. It's not going to remain important. But if they are reading it as, "Oh, this is an allegory for our day," then it is something that already has some built-in links. It already has some relationships built in. Yeah. And yeah, that would've been considered a pretty monumental achievement of Hezekiah to reroute the Gihon Spring underneath the City of David to feed down to the Pool of Siloam, and I have walked through that tunnel on multiple occasions and am- Me too ... unsettled by it every single time. I am beneath I don't know how many feet of bedrock. But yeah, that would've been quite the feat. And so, it makes for an interesting kind of historical, I don't know, something for the story to orbit around in the minds of later readers. So you're putting this toward the end of the 8th century. Just out of curiosity, are you imagining this to be the very origin of the character of Moses and the tradition of the Exodus, or is this being appropriated from something preexisting, maybe from the Northern Kingdom? What are your thoughts on those ideas?

Angela Roskop Erisman That's a great question. We usually think of the Exodus as originating in the Northern Kingdom because it's mentioned in Hosea, the northern prophet Hosea. The thing is that those references refer to what, at least as I track in my book, are later versions of the story. Okay. I do not think the Exodus story has a northern origin. Okay. I think this is it. And a different question is can we track a Moses character back through oral tradition, as we used to call it. Now we call it cultural memory. Which is a concept that is really a valid concept, to be sure, but sometimes I wonder if it isn't oral tradition come back as a zombie. Yeah.

Dan McClellan Well, it's not something that we have a lot of data for. We don't. We're basically reconstructing it as we go and just trying to- Yeah ... figure out what fits the best with our reconstruction of the past. Right. That's right.

Angela Roskop Erisman And this all fits together so beautifully, right?

Dan McClellan The- And yeah, it also... Go ahead. Yeah.

Angela Roskop Erisman So I don't want to take anyone's Moses away. On the other hand, I think it's harmful even to ourselves as Bible readers to get stuck on things that we wish were there. Right? Absolutely. Yeah. And there's no evidence, right? Yeah. So why, when we have a compelling story of how it originated, would we bother? And I say that with empathy and understanding how hard it is to let some of those things go. Right?

Dan Beecher Sorry, just to clarify, just because I'm worried that I'm getting lost here. When you say that there's no evidence, you're talking about for a historical Exodus, for the story of the Exodus and Moses to have actually been real.

Angela Roskop Erisman If one assumes it was history. But you see what I've just shown you is that it is a very real story. It's just a very different kind of relationship between story and history than we- Oh, yeah ... understand. And this goes back to genre, because the reason that we look for an Exodus and a Moses in the late Bronze Age is because we understand this story as history writing in some sense.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. Okay?

Angela Roskop Erisman But once we understand that, oh, this started, at least its life, as fictional biography, right? That is political allegory. Suddenly, the whole world can look different.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Dan Beecher Is there a sense in which, because when I think of allegory, like purposefully written allegory, it occurs to me that each element of it, each plot point, each big moment of it especially, would be representative of something, would be an allegory for a specific thing that happened in the story that's being presented. Are those marking posts there that you're seeing when you're connecting it to... I'm sorry, did you say Zechariah? Who did you- Hezekiah. Hezekiah. Hezekiah. Yeah.

Angela Roskop Erisman Look, I- That's all right. Yeah.

Dan Beecher I'm still- You- I'm more- ...

Dan McClellan got a lot of reading to do before your comps on the Israelite kings, but- Yeah, exactly ... that's okay. Or Judah.

Dan Beecher Look, no one ever claimed I was the scholar in this scenario.

Dan McClellan Well, that raises a great question. You go through several chapters where I think what you're trying to show is how what we see in the allegory can reflect what's going on the ground in late eighth century Judah. Right. It can, but it does in complex ways.

Angela Roskop Erisman I think the idea, what the other Dan is talking about is a very one-to-one thing, A, B. Yeah. And the great literary scholar, Northrop Frye, who had a lot to say about allegory, talks about allegories as working like, it's like listening to a Bach fugue, right? And the voices are the literature and the history. Right? And instead of making it a one-to-one correspondences makes it what he calls a naive allegory.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. And it's very wooden, right?

Angela Roskop Erisman And unsatisfying. But have you ever listened to a Bach fugue? Of course. Yeah. Well, the voices are doing interesting things. They're having conversations like we're having here, and the totality is more than the sum of the parts. Right? And so I think that's, not to say that people don't write wooden allegories, but this is not a wooden allegory.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. Right?

Angela Roskop Erisman It has this very complex relationship with the historical situation it allegorizes because if my reading of it is right, it was probably meant to convince both the Judean elite that Hezekiah had a plan for not running Judah into the ground here, right? It's in grave danger of extinction in this moment, and that he had a plan, and probably also to show the Assyrians that I'm like you, right? My story is your story, right? And you can leave me on the throne. So, the text may have had, we don't have documents to track it out, but it would seem to have had a rhetorical function, or meant to have a rhetorical function, in conversation with the very thing it allegorizes. And that adds up to a kind of complexity that a one-to-one idea of how allegory works can't do justice to.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. Now, you mentioned previously that fear is something that comes up over and over again. Yeah. I'm curious how that is a through line through some of these allegories, because it doesn't strike me that fear is a particularly useful rhetorical instrument in speaking to the Assyrians. It seems like that would have more value in speaking to other Judahites. But how are you addressing fear in- Yeah ... the book?

Angela Roskop Erisman Fear doesn't really play a role in that particular version of the story. It comes into play, so in Exodus 17, when the Israelites come to, when the elders come to complain- ... they're really not, often in these stories, they're complaining because they're ticked off or they're afraid. Right?

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Angela Roskop Erisman In this version of the story, they're really just holding him accountable. They're like, "Man, we got this problem here. It's a really big problem.

Dan McClellan What are you going to do? You got a plan?

Angela Roskop Erisman What's going to happen? You can't let us... You're the king. It's your job to sustain us and make sure that we survive." But as the story gets retold, emotions come into play, including fear, and disgust, and anger. Fear and anger, they're all very closely related. Disgust, less so, but fear and anger and blame are bedfellows. This shows up in philosophy on this subject. Martha Nussbaum has written on it, a philosopher that folks might have heard of before, among other people. So when they start complaining out of fear, the dynamics start to change. And so then we see different things start to happen, and we can jump ahead to Numbers and the Korah episode where fear plays a role. I don't know if you want to- Dive in. Want me to go- Get in there, man ...

Dan Beecher into that? Sure. Let's talk about it. Yeah. Sure. Well, this episode comes significantly later as I see it in the literary history of the wilderness narrative.

Angela Roskop Erisman By this time, the Judeans have been destroyed by the Babylonians. They have experienced exile. And I, along with many scholars now, would situate the Korah story in the Persian period after they have come back and are striving to reestablish some kind of society.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Angela Roskop Erisman And so there are several episodes that I discuss in the book that are background for this, where there's negotiation about who plays the leadership role. Is it Moses? Is it Caleb? Is it Aaron? Mm. Right? So fear comes into play here because now you have a people in a very different kind of historical circumstance. They're not just afraid of the Assyrians and holding their king accountable. They've been through hell. Right? Hell is real. Hell is real. They've been through hell and back. I listened to your episode with David Carr, where he had a lot to say about trauma, as he's worked on significantly, and how much trauma influences Biblical literature. So, I think that this is a feature of this. And in this episode, fear doesn't drive the complaint. In fact, bravery does. Korah, this is not how most people read it. But either way, it takes some chutzpah to stand up to Moses and Aaron and say, "Hey, what are you doing? Why are you lording it over us? Who gave you all this power?"

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. Right?

Angela Roskop Erisman That's dissent. Right. And to speak truth to power as we know in theory and as we are seeing all the time, takes a great deal of bravery. And so in the Korah episode, this bravery is met with manipulation. Now, this is not how it's usually read, as I mentioned. Korah is usually seen as the bad guy.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. Right?

Angela Roskop Erisman The rebel, and of course, he is framed that way. But whether a rebel or a hero depends on where you stand, doesn't it? Right. Yeah. So as I was looking at, gee, how does genre come into play in this episode? I found a lot of rhetorical techniques. And I'll mention a couple, and these led me to read the episode very differently. So they hold Moses accountable, and instead of answering their charge, Moses says, "Who are you to complain about who is holy?" Not your job. That's God's job to say who and what is holy. So what Moses does, it sounds good. It sounds like humility. It sounds like, let's leave that up to God and let God decide.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Angela Roskop Erisman But note what he does in that story. He establishes a procedure for determining God's word on this point of contention that involves Korah and the 250 laypeople, Korah is a Levite, who are with him, that involves them offering incense. And if we go back to the beginning of the Book of Numbers, we learn that even handling the objects required to offer incense is a death sentence. You are doomed to die unless you're Aaron. Right? Unless you're Aaron, you're not supposed to handle those things. You're not supposed to offer incense. You're not supposed to handle those things. So this is a setup Right. Right.

Dan McClellan Bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Yes. It's a setup, right?

Angela Roskop Erisman It looks like Moses is setting up a trial by ordeal, right? Right. A decision that God will make. But its conclusion, if you've read the beginning of Numbers, is foreordained.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. Right?

Angela Roskop Erisman You know what it's going to be even before they go and offer the incense, and as we know, they're incinerated when they do it. So it's a terrifying story. Mm. So the fear in this story, the purpose of this story, as I read it, is to stamp down dissent, right?

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Angela Roskop Erisman It's not aimed at the rebels, right? It's aimed at dissuading us reading the story from being rebels, because this is what's going to happen to you if you challenge authority, right?

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Angela Roskop Erisman So, there's some dirty pool happening in this- ... in this story, and it was really shocking to see, and I have to be honest that, as excited as I was to discover how the rock-water story works, it took me a couple of months to accept that this is how the Korah story works, because I didn't want that to be there. Do you know what I mean? And I want to say that because I think a lot of probably your audience, people listening to "Data Over Dogma," don't want to find dirty pool in the Bible. We're not looking for dirty pool in the Bible. Right. Right? But it's there, right? And when we think about what it's designed to do, that it's manipulating fear, right? Fear of death- Mm ... to coerce obedience to power. Yeah. We all know how destructive that can be, right? It's also very interesting political thinking because it portends, in almost a mind-boggling way, this is Thomas Hobbes's argument in "Leviathan" for the modern state, right? That fear of death is what gets people to submit to the state, right? Yeah. So there's some- A very- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan Machiavellian approach to how we- It is ... run the government. And you talk quite a bit about the political allegory running through all of this and the role of politics. And do you have in mind, so we're talking about the Persian period, do you have in mind any particular specific time period or ruler whose sovereignty is intended to be rendered unquestionable or- Mm-hmm ... inviolable by this? Yeah. Are you able to get so granular with when you think this is operating? Yes. Okay. Mm-hmm.

Angela Roskop Erisman Yes, and I probably shouldn't be so confident about that because- ... we are rightly cautious. We should be cautious about these things. But once I realized it was allegory and was able to start tracking these things, there's a similar dynamic happening in the books of Haggai and Zechariah- Mm-hmm ... right, where we have a priest jockeying for political power. There, the priest's name is Joshua bin Yehoyadak.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Angela Roskop Erisman That is Aaron's historical alter ego. Okay.

Dan McClellan So this has a budding rod somewhere in his house. Right. Yeah.

Angela Roskop Erisman Well, of course, the budding rod is itself, and I write about this in the book. It's a wonderful mishmash of images, right? The idea of a wooden rod that sprouts evokes Isaiah 11 and the shoot that shall come from the stump- The stump, yeah ... of Jesse, right? Yeah. So, this is all royal imagery, and it's so beautifully intertextual, right? These scribes were, if there's anything I came away from this book with that I didn't have before, it was such a deep sense of how incredibly intelligent and talented and creative these scribes who are responsible for our Bible were.

Dan McClellan Yeah, and this is something that I have to push back against quite frequently on social media, the idea that these are the scribblings of goat herders from, usually people say the Bronze Age or the Iron Age. But yeah, I think they don't appreciate exactly how skilled these folks were in these languages. These are among the most talented and the most well-educated people in that part of the world.

Angela Roskop Erisman Absolutely true. Yeah.

Dan McClellan And I think there's an awful lot that we can learn about how genre worked in this time period by understanding that. Unfortunately, I find that a lot of folks who are drawn to the kind of content I produce sometimes bring with it a degree of cynicism and- Yeah ... even invective regarding the qualities and the value of the Bible that they tend to gloss right over an awful lot of that stuff, which is quite unfortunate. Yeah.

Angela Roskop Erisman And to those folks, I would say, and I know that we find them across the spectrum, right? I've taught in Christian contexts, I've taught in Jewish contexts, I've taught in secular contexts, and I think that what I would say is that the Bible is for everybody. There's something in it for everybody. Nobody owns it. We all share it. Yeah. There's a great beauty in getting together to talk about what's going on in it. It's full of messages that are meaningful in spiritual ways. It's full of political theory.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. Not theory in the philosophical sense, they weren't writing philosophy, but they were thinking about these same ideas.

Angela Roskop Erisman There's no question, and it's really rich. Such great material for folks who are interested in that. The literary creativity is mind-boggling. And so, it's beautiful, and I just want to invite people in.

Dan McClellan Now, a question I have before we move on is, what do you think these allegories are trying to say about the relationship of the palace to the temple? Because that is something that is kind of woven throughout the Exodus story. If Moses is representative of royalty, of political power, we do have over and against that power is the power of the priesthood. Do you think this is an attempt to hierarchize things so that everybody understands the palace has priority over the temple? Because there are also instances where the privilege of the priesthood seems to come out on top. Right.

Angela Roskop Erisman Well, I think that that's a great question. I don't think it's the right question for this narrative because- Okay ... the only version of it that I understand to be pre-exilic, when there would have been both a temple and a palace- Right ... is that earliest Exodus, that story about Moses that's really a story about Hezekiah.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Angela Roskop Erisman And so the rest of it is exilic or post-exilic. So even in those stories that I think are post-exilic, we have to understand them in a context where the king was the Persian emperor, right?

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Angela Roskop Erisman There was no king, right? Right. So there was no palace, right? But why are they talking about kingship and sovereignty? Why all the royal imagery, even in Aaron's vestments, right? A lot of that is royal imagery. The rosette on his turban, on his headdress- Mm-hmm ... is a royal image, an Assyrian royal image.

Dan McClellan I find that the most helpful idea for this for me came from the scholarship of Ian Wilson. Mm-hmm.

Angela Roskop Erisman He talks about kingship discourse. Yeah. And I think this is really important because it helps us understand how the literature can still be using ideas and images about kingship to talk about political power in general, right? So even though there was no king, and again- Mm-hmm ... we have to get away from these texts being merely descriptive, right? They weren't just describing what was going on. They were interacting with- Yeah ... trying to shape the world they lived in. Yeah. Right? Absolutely. So to use the deep history of kingship imagery to jockey for political power, whether you're Zerubbabel or Joshua or Nehemiah, right? And I think we might be seeing some of all of that happening, getting worked out in sort of what you might call loosely an epic form in the- Mm-hmm ... wilderness narrative.

Dan McClellan And we see similar things today with a lot of people trying to cast themselves as players in some kind of mythical golden age thing, the Tea Party, where we're going back to a time period- Mm-hmm ... where those kinds of things don't really happen anymore. Those roles aren't operative anymore in our society, but people want to cast themselves in those roles in, it seems to me, sometimes in an attempt to try to invoke the same outcomes, to try to influence- Mm-hmm ... the future towards getting out of their present what happened in the past. So in another way, using the past to inform their experiences- Yeah ... in the present. Yeah.

Angela Roskop Erisman The imagery is powerful, and I think it matters. This is an issue that comes up in my book. I don't talk about it in the book, but I'm going to in my blog as I write sort of more readily accessible versions of what I've talked about in the book. It matters how you use it. So we have- Mm-hmm ... this dirty pool rhetoric in the Korah story, but the story doesn't end there, thank goodness, right? And so we see Moses in other episodes trying to use rhetoric in a different way. Instead of to drive wedges in the community and terrify people, to hold God and Israel together, right? We see cases like that. So I was listening to a book the other day, an audiobook by a philosopher named Jason Stanley, "How Fascism Works." And early on in that book, he points out, and I can't remember the context, but that there are good actors and bad actors, right? And it matters which one you are. Right? Rhetoric itself is not bad inherently, but in the hands of bad actors, it can do a lot of harm.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Angela Roskop Erisman In the hands of good actors, it can repair relationships and restore wholeness.

Dan McClellan And defend vulnerable groups- Yes ... from dissolution. That's something that I think we see an awful lot in the Hebrew Bible as well. We see marginalized groups, at least on the broader geopolitical scale, trying to defend themselves and trying to survive. Yeah.

Angela Roskop Erisman Even if it does involve some dirty pool- Yeah ...

Dan McClellan here and there. Yeah.

Angela Roskop Erisman One of the things that I want to acknowledge is it's uncomfortable to see these stories that are just deeply manipulative. Right?

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Angela Roskop Erisman What is Phyllis Trible's term for this? Troubled text? I can't remember it exactly. Yeah. But just problematic texts that just don't sit well with us, and rightly so. But I think there's value in them being in scripture because they show us possibilities that we might not otherwise want to think about, but that are important to know about. Right? Yeah. They show us our ugly side, and I think it's important to know our ugly side as a community because if we don't know it, it can come up and bite us in the rear. Yeah. Right?

Dan McClellan And if we are never exposed to it, we think we don't have one. Yes. And that we're never wrong. Yes. And I think of Alexia Fry when you mention Phyllis Trible, because I think the phrase is texts of terror. That's it. Is that what you're thinking about? Yes.

Angela Roskop Erisman Yes, I am. Thank you. Yes.

Dan McClellan Because Alexia Fry, who does a lot of work with trauma theory and the Hebrew Bible- Yeah ... she has a series on social media where she talks about texts of terror, and then she- ... talks an awful lot about very traumatic stories, but showing that a lens of trauma can help us understand, operationalize these texts in ways other than how they were probably intended. Yeah.

Angela Roskop Erisman But the wilderness, there's a through line through the wilderness narrative, and it starts at the sea. Exodus 14 is one of these complaint episodes.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm.

Angela Roskop Erisman It's just a very complex one, and in it, Moses engineers survival.

Dan McClellan And it's a great way to start, and this line runs through the entire wilderness narrative of healing and repair from the damage that the Aaron character has done. Mm-hmm. Right? Yeah.

Angela Roskop Erisman There are several episodes that directly counter this dirty pool rhetoric. And so we see the possibility of even healing from what's broken. Yeah. And I think that's great.

Dan McClellan Aaron does a lot of damage and doesn't seem to face too much accountability for it. No. He manages to survive through the narrative, which is unusual, particularly when he's creating an idol for everybody to worship right before Moses says, "Oh, that means death," with the- Yeah ... with the commandments. I had a question. The last time you brought up the word complaint, it reminded me of some work that I've done on the complaint genre within the Psalms, particularly related to Psalm 82, because I talk about that- Oh, great ... as kind of a hybrid of different genres. The divine council motif- Mm-hmm ... is being combined with the gods' complaint or the God complaint, so that Adonai is issuing a complaint to the gods of the divine council. And I'm curious if you see any resonance between these complaint episodes and the complaint genre within the Psalms, where you have this pattern of saying, "Here's our problem. Here's what you have done for us in the past. We know you can help us. Get up and do something." Do you see any resonance with the complaints that you're identifying in these narratives?

Angela Roskop Erisman I haven't really thought about that, but there's certainly an emotional resonance. Right?

Dan McClellan And do we have any questions where the complaints begin with, "Why are you doing this? Why are you allowing this to happen? How long are you going to allow this to happen?" That kind of stuff?

Angela Roskop Erisman Not how long, but certainly why. Okay. Why.

Dan McClellan The word lama- Lama, yeah ...

Angela Roskop Erisman lama occurs in many of the complaints. Okay. But those are generally, there are exceptions, but generally addressed to Moses.

Dan Beecher Yeah, you do make a distinction in the book between cries to God and complaints to Moses specifically. Yeah. And talk a little bit about the differences between those two kinds of complaining.

Angela Roskop Erisman Well, they're effectively the same. It's just a question of who the Israelites perceive is their leader in any given situation. Right? Who the royal figure is. Mm.

Dan McClellan Mm-hmm. Right?

Angela Roskop Erisman So, in what I see to be the exilic version of the narrative, they are imagining, very much like Deutero-Isaiah, they're imagining a march home from exile. Right? And the royal language in Deutero-Isaiah, and also in the wilderness narrative for God, is no accident. Right? In the absence of a king, in a story, whether it's poetic or in narrative form, where they are imagining liberation from their oppressive foreign emperor, they imagine God, all that kingship discourse, that role is occupied by God. Right. But sometimes in the wilderness, even when they ought to know that it's God who brought them out of Egypt, right, in that version of the story, out of Babylon, right, out of exile.